Shadow
in the Church
Tom Sheehan
Pay for your sin,
the voice had said. Atone. Many times
the voice from the darkened choir loft said the same words. Never in a shout did the words arrive, but in
a murmur from the shadows, an oath of a murmur.
When Reverend Tomorrow Sandspur, spanking new to cloth and
collar, received his first assignment, he was fully aware of the stories about
the little church on the Virginia
mountainside before he arrived. The whole state knew the main episode, the deciding
issue, as did everybody living in the narrow Chawkenauga Valley
dipping down to the Shenandoah. Knowing the stories did not make his beginning
any easier. Minor trepidation, he also realized, had a keen prying edge if let
loose. Tommy, at his best, tried to
hold that tool in check. He prayed en
route as well as at arrival.
Pay for your sin.
Atone. Ghostly and godly were the words as promise and portent played about
the message coming from beyond shadow or from within shadow.
Thirty years earlier, the way the story turned, Molly
Pritchard Ware had died playing the organ on a Sunday morning service at the Gracious Mountain Church
of the Forgiven. The church sat on that Virginia
mountain, which fell straightaway to the Chawkenauga Valley.
From the peaks, they say yet, thunder rolled a mighty clap just before she died,
like cannon left over from a forgotten battle that had come for resurrection. A
sweeping rain battered the shingles on the roof and beat at the clapboards of
the church. It was near cataclysmic, the moaning that ensued, and the shrill
yells that blew out of throats bound in piety but moments before. At the organ
for her thirty-fifth year, Molly was in flower-crowned hat and a deep blue
dress, one of her much-worn alternating pair, and the dress hid the torments of
pain she had lately known. Few of the congregation knew about her illness,
though Mag Curran, the storekeeper’s wife, had said on occasion that Molly’s eyes do come desperate at the oddest.
The last note Molly accomplished, as sad and mournful as
could be they said, was given rise by a hand frozen suddenly on one key in
concert with the final crash of thunder and lightning let loose of the mountain.
The note, a booming basso hit, legendary, an echo to the thunder itself, fled
through the church and out the door like an old nighttime freight train running
free and loose down through the old plantations.
Some of the congregation still get chills and goose bumps
when they talk about it.
Lucas Trimm, the janitor and general man about the grounds, said
the note reminded him of a loon desperately sounding for its mate, and
the Lord God hisself abetting that search. At the lectern, his sermon
almost done, then Reverend Abish Dowd,
a full believer in all things preternatural, heavenly and earthly at the once, heard the singular note from the
choir loft and knew the organ, and the church from that moment thence, was
stricken. Numbness, they also said, touched his face for a good long time.
**
That first evening of a new assignment, of a new career,
Reverend Tomorrow Tommy Sandspur sat
alone in the church collecting himself after a most unsettling journey. His
mother had called him Tomorrow from the day of his birth, always looking to the
future, pushing hope as well as the pram, and his father, not always sure of
the future, fell quickly into calling him Tommy.
So much easier his choice, and not so pretentious.
And so it was to this church he had been summoned by the
congregation, the salary lean, and the promises merely decent. Thirty-one years
old, lately commissioned out of farm life and odd pursuits, he was a light
blond with darker brows and eyes full of questions whose answers lay elsewhere.
Many women thought him handsomer than the devil himself, but wondered about
that look in his eyes. His clasped hands gave keen exhibit to early life as
farmer and laborer and more recently as a somewhat knockabout; a few knuckles spread
convincingly at their joints and a remnant of thick skin worn on the heels of
his hands appeared as single chevrons of those late duties. His shoulders sat a
slope as if the last load carried had left a mark. Or an ominous future.
Mag Curran, part of the committee bringing him to the
assignment, directed him to the church when he helloed her on the lower road on
arrival. Later she said to some of her women friends, “I swear, he’s too pretty
to been where he’s been.”
As Tomorrow sat in a front pew, fidgeting thoughts working
him, an essence of rose came to him, though limping in a way, as if shorting
itself of full bloom. Wind and air, he realized, always had a fair vantage in
the Virginia
valleys and the Chawkenauga had its share of those joys. You could be visited
anytime by anything ethereal. Though, in the case of the Gracious Mountain
Church of the Forgiven,
that ethereal being he would soon believe to be the ghost of Molly Pritchard
Ware not letting go what she had let go of.
At the moment the edge of the pew was sharp as an ax edge
and he could feel the line of it, the dimension mattering, the church making
its first real physical impression. Even though the air was soft in a manner,
there came appreciation of that other odor, though hesitant in its reach. It
brought him full circle to a girl he had spent an afternoon with when he was
only fifteen years old, in a place he could barely remember, though there were
dust and cobwebs and more peculiar odors abounding from that memorial frivolity.
But her name had deployed outside the memories. At that precise instant, as if the
trace of early sin had not let go, he saw the shadow in the choir loft in his
first look at the storied reach, the myth of Molly Pritchard Ware at her given work.
He gathered himself, gathered all his beliefs, and took a deep breath. When he
raised his arms in supplication, the shadow fled into other shadows. Not a
whisper of sound ensued.
For the hundredth time since this new journey had started,
he was sure, he thought about Molly Pritchard Ware, and the times since her
departure, the pry bar, the lever of trepidation, fully in place.
**
He had indeed heard all the stories:
For those thirty years the organ was mute, turning slowly to
a thin veneer of rust, clutching silence as its forte. And Reverend Dowd,
taking his full belief with him, had long departed the church where he too had
opened his ministry, and suddenly closed shop. Some people said he was a
mailman in western Pennsylvania
and had taken up with a woman he had known some years earlier. When he left Gracious Mountain Church,
in a sudden rush, noted Mag Curran, nobody followed to bring him back.
And nobody ventured into the choir loft either. The several clergy who came in
the intervening years, and went their ways, never asked for organ music. Some
of them, on a private note, agreed there was enough sound in the silence of the
loft and in the rusting pipes of the old organ to create self-pause. Usually, when they were alone in the church
working on a sermon, such determinations came to them.
As for Molly Pritchard Ware, she had left her marks deeper
than other marks. They appeared to be permanent. Some people had forgotten her
goodness.
Besides the many years of her organ playing every Sunday
morning but one, when she had given birth to son Jacob, Molly had been special
in her gifts and giving. No matter who approached her for help, no matter the
tone of voice or the tone of skin, she was responsive. Bert and Little Myrtle
Stubbs, burned out of their cottage one Doomsday of a Saturday, stood at the
small flagpole in the yard of their smoldering house, their arms around one another,
tears rampant on each, the horizon a distance that seemed too far, and house resurrection
an impossibility.
“Come along, you two,” Molly said after the fire had burned
itself to ashes. “Bring yourself to my cottage. Supper’s on the table in an
hour. You’ve got a bed to sleep on and a place to say thanks to the Lord that
you got out. He’ll be listening for you.” She herded them like children in from
recess, down the hill, across the valley, to her cottage. They stayed for three
weeks while a new cottage was built by friends beside the ruins of the first
one.
When Davon Wilyum Pumphrey, mistakenly targeted by white
neighbors as one culprit in a minor crime, was chased by dogs into Molly’s
barn, she hailed him out of the barn with a solicitous wave and an ugainly loud
voice. “Come to supper, Davon Wilyum. My table sprouts for the evening meal. If
anybody here dares stop long enough to think about this, they’ll know you did
no wrong.” With a still loud voice and a steady finger pointing at the
semblance of a posse, she said in assured belief, “For land’s sake, this boy’s
been near deaf since he was born. How in the world could he a heard any signal
like you talk about. Mind to your own hearing, the lot of you.”
After Molly had gone,
and during an initial period of musical suspension, one Sunday visitor saw a
shadow high up in the back of The Gracious Mountain Church. It was a silhouette
of an unknown figure. There was no music. No wind in the eaves. The organ had
not sounded in some months. The man bolted from the church. People heard his
screaming about a ghost in the choir. That set the speed and the clatter about
Molly’s organ and the visitations. For more than thirty years the organ at Gracious Mountain Church,
which people called The Silent Master, made no sound, accompanied no choir,
took part in no service. The story is told that the visitor wanted to check the
shadow out but something held him back, a sense of disbelief caught in the back
of his mind; his eyes seeing but his mind disbelieving. The man swore the
shadow had moved, as if seated at the organ, arms in the movement of playing
the instrument. And the shadow wore a hat crowned with flowers. There was attar
in accompaniment.
**
Now, it is Sunday evening and Tomorrow’s sermon has long
fled his mind and those of the congregation of the Gracious Mountain
Church of the Forgiven. They
had shuffled out of church into a sunshine rising brilliant from leaf
reflection and off the grass, humor and
rumor in a kind of monotone coming back at him, a pointed aside on stage. He
had not struck out, he vouchered, but he may still be at bat. They gathered in
groups as he watched their slow departures, discussing opinions, planning the
balance of the day. He did not figure to be in that balance.
Tomorrow is twisted in a pew. Both of his feet are caught
under the pew in front of him, and his head screwed around to check again on
the shadow’s movement, which has been solemnly illustrated, as if for him only,
in the thick shadows of the choir loft. He is startled by a sudden pass of wind
at the single stained glass window in the church, all of six feet high on the
eastern wall, and twists around to look at the window. The pew squeaks as he
twists about, awed accompaniment. For a second’s relief, there is neither
silhouette nor outline at the window, fully off-stage. At that moment, for the
first time in some thirty years, like the lead character sound of an overture, a
note escapes the organ. It’s a flat note, a chambered note, with the companion
sensation of a hand touching him. Depth rides in it as if it were a chariot out
of the ether, the way logs ride in a full wagon. Tomorrow twists back, caught
between attractions. The window whistles. He twists again. The organ sounds yet
again. Distinct, separate notes are matched. His ear catches a musical
completion, notes that belong together, notes from a song or a hymn he has long
forgotten until that moment. The shadow moves, hands with rhythm, the head
moving in concert. And then speaks.
“Atone,” he hears.
It’s a whisper of the word, as light and shadowy as the loft
at the upper reaches, away from substance of deep shadows. At the back of his
neck, pushed up through the spinal column, another touch advances. The wind
perhaps, he thinks, a slice of new air. He knows he is being unsettled; he was
always unsettled, even in some convictions that carried weight. It has been his
due. His mother had cautioned: “Tomorrow, there’s always tomorrow coming at you.”
And his father, later: “A man is born a man. The Lord knew what He was doing.”
Tommy Sandspur knows he is going to be punished for his
indiscretions, that silent and endless clutch always at him, day or night,
awake or asleep, on Earth or elsewhere it would seem. And as penance and part
of that belief, he is acutely aware of the perfume the one girl wore many years
ago in that one vacant barn a distant and ephemeral way up the Shenandoah Valley, a far and faint aroma calling out
names. The rose, short of its full intent, comes back subtle as a half smile,
an eye gleam, the way only a woman’s hip can move without movement, silk giving
away guidance, sometimes a demonic balance only he is alert to. He can see, as
vivid as any memory, what the structure of the barn looked like, what the
Saturday night girl looked like in his arms, her lips anointing, how she
presses against him still, and, evermore, the clattered, stringy way old leather
goods hung on a wall, the old shine of it gone asunder in the same method and
route new shoes escape newness. Too, he could remember the odd way he measured
the sweat that such goods must have accomplished, what the mules had done
daylong for a kind of forever. Eternity, in its call-back, swung a punch at him,
a lethal punch. Nothing in his ken could escape it.
Mag Curran probably had guessed right on many accounts, and
especially on one of them when she said, more than an aside, “If your past
catches up to you, Tomorrow, I’d be a listener for you today.” She had
suspicions but did not know the depth of his encounter.
For him realization came out of the woodwork, centered
itself, became known, the oak’s gnarl smoothed. The lost voice of the girl with
the lost face, and the lost name, mattered wholly. Then, his breath withdrawn
as if held for punishment, the air crawled to a hush. Movement all about him,
in all things, turned slow and suspenseful and drew back into Creation, and he
knew the rose again, the sweetest attar he’d ever known.
The sweetness knocked him into total recall, everything legitimate,
and everything with edges for the grasping. The haymow returned in proper
order, in that place where memory is nearest the tangible, near arms’ length,
at the wait, mocking the usually half-framed sensibilities. The mow’s spider
webs maintained high positions, caught silver from bare light, ran off with
roof cracks, edges of beams, illusions loose like the ends of railroad tracks
far up the Shenandoah. Though it came subtle, a bare whisper at first, it eventually
released its magic, its full bloom, like awakening with the complete dream
still in place. And the girl’s eyes appeared and her lips and her brows and the
sweet sweep of eyelashes, the message center itself. The touch that had never
ended no matter his mission, came back, and the ultimate sense of softness he
had never known again elsewhere, and her name above all names.
Hannah!
Tomorrow’s time had come this day. The voice outside him,
the voice from the choir loft, the voice inside him, said, “Hannah.” Her face
came back to him, and then the barn again, and the topsy-turvy moment when they
collided in the hay and the dust and the old leather gear and honest labor
remains all around them, the unforgettable unforgotten again.
It was the organist talking without a doubt. It was Molly
Pritchard Ware’s ghost doing what it had meant to do. “Go back. Go back up the
Shenandoah. Hannah waits forever, Hannah who brought surprise. Go back or I will
never let go.”
Off to Flatfalls, in the middle of the following week, the
voice behind him at an urging, went Tomorrow Tommy Sandspur fearful of the
connection with a yesterday sitting in his brain hard as a rock, not letting go
for a second. It had never let go.
The way up the Shenandoah was extremely beautiful, but the
range of comeliness, ten thousand years in the forming, was lost in him, the
peaks abject, and the hills easily surmountable. His inner spirits flattened
all views, suffused all elements into one distant horizon. For little more than
a month he had been at the church at Gracious Mountain, a month beset with
memories, atonement of one measure or another digging its relentless way, and
fear so liquid it ran in him in a daily pattern. All of it cornered and spread
out his days and his nights. So induced, he now did not see the sweep of hills or
majesty of crags bidding welcome to the sturdy, nor did he see, or feel the way
he should have, the moments of silence coming down on him sure as darkness
falls after twilight. He had gone far beyond the awareness of Virginia’s natural beauty. He could only
grasp at one true sense of beauty and he believed that to be forgiveness itself.
Forgiveness had to matter.
“I will never let you go,” the voice from the loft had said.
And the voice from inside said it also, it too being liquid, moving as freely
as his blood under this strange impetus. Tomorrow Sandspur whispered, “Lord,
the scab of this sore keeps breaking.”
Flatfalls, many years before, had originally been urged into
the last option in the area for a new town, a veritable squeeze play of
geography and geology, fulfilling the last Ice Age push so evident in the
region. The small town hugged the edge of the mountain where it could listen to
music from a minor waterfall coming to rest at a placid stream running nearly
dry every September. Peace and serenity of a faint order held sway in the
paths, dirt roads, and clipped fields where hills and mountains intruded in
their steep and abrupt measures. The toes of the crags themselves appeared in
the dark earth landscape, gray, bothersome obstacles to farmers, but in the end
were tolerated. Crops came rich in small reaches, the bottom land dark and deep
where the Ice Age made its deposit, and resulted from the hard work of those
who farmed at Flatfalls.
Tomorrow remembered how he had loved his stay in this small
hamlet, as he worked for one farmer and merchant, honest labors appreciated, long
hours noted, his demeanor gaining quiet nods from townsfolk, few as they were.
“You might find a home here, Tomorrow,” the farmer and merchant Tyron Gibbs had
said one evening as Tomorrow sat to supper on Gibbs’ porch, the long day’s
aches gently subsiding. “You know what’s got to be done and find ways to do it,”
the old man continued. “That’s a whole lot of good sense for a young man.”
At the end of one proud summer of honest labor, September
falling with graces, Gibbs’s fifteen-year old daughter Hannah had unaccountably
beamed at the table that evening. At first sight, when the summer began, she
had been strikingly beautiful, with jet black hair, flawless skin that glistened
on her cheeks, a young bud in spring who wore her early years too readily; a
clumsy gait, an untrue stance, and a false laughter that carried too far its
signals. This night her blue eyes were incandescent, full of the surest fire
the young man had ever seen. The whole summer she had been, like an immature
woman in a developing temperament, at the edge of all things. She was
positioned everywhere, all around him when he worked. When he swung a pitchfork
for the hay she posed at the zenith of his swing, when he milked the two cows
she smiled in the frame of a barn window, when he rolled over in bed to sleep
she was bound to leave odors everywhere. The fire in the evening eyes made an
announcement, said some scale had been reached, achieved, said that she had
covered ground he dared not anticipate. He did not believe it was her foot
touching his again and again under the table, prompting him, exciting him, later
suggesting him along a path of darkness before the evening was over. “I have
waited forever for someone like you to smile at me.”
For young Tomorrow Sandspur, it had been ignition.
Now, caught up in the old sensations, he was back at
Flatfalls. No more than two minutes into Luddum’s General Store to quench a
solid thirst, a dozen known odors assailing him anew from the hillsides and
elsewhere, old Ben Luddum behind the counter staring at him in quick disbelief,
he was suddenly looking at himself.
The young man was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, blond as a
towhead could be, thick across the shoulders widened by hard labor, his neck
thick and robust too. He had spun about with a fresh pear in hand, about to
yell out to someone. A small scar rode one side of his forehead, his nose fell
clean and even, his mouth was full of bright teeth. Their eyes locked in a
momentary signal, both reaching for a system of recognition, both acknowledging
the mirror looks of the other. The pear sat in the youth’s hand as if in
offering, his mouth open in indecisive salute. Each warranted the other’s
attention, alarm, similarity, intrusion, and personal acknowledgment; the way a
lock of hair fell off to one side of the forehead, how it dangled a sense of
the devil-may care, the eyes at subtle assessment, how the left shoulder of
each dipped as if the heart in place there was a heavy load.
A grasp of breath held one spot in Tomorrow Sandspur’s
throat as he looked at a face that looked back at him every time he shaved.
Unknown facts rushed toward conclusion.
The first word was barely echoed from a corner of the store,
from a hidden alcove soft with shadows, when Tomorrow recognized it. “Tommy,” the
voice said, and a second “Tommy,” repeated affirmation of its owner, “come look
at this new fishing pole.”
One single, unforgettable aroma swept Tomorrow asunder as
Hannah Gibbs came out of the soft shadows. Age had not caught her in its grasp.
Her hair was dark and deep as night, yet the new light of an overhead bulb made
aureoles of reflections on her cheeks. Roundness had not found her either, but
comfort had, and a grace in movement that flooded Tomorrow as she handed off a
fishing rod in one hand. “See this new one, Tommy. It feels real comfortable.”
She held the rod toward the young man, and then her eyes found those of
Tomorrow Tommy Sandspur.
The fire he could remember in the eyes that once had looked
up at him in the old haymow, was alive and burning.
Hannah Gibbs froze near the end of the counter as she looked
at Tommy Sandspur over the shoulder of her son. Behind the counter, his face
appearing as if he were reading the last chapter of a book, the last paragraph
of a story, a last rapturous line, Ben Luddum could hardly wait to tell his
wife what he was seeing firsthand and fully righteous.
All of them realized at once what was happening. The entire
scene might have been arranged those many years ago, the next scene coming in
rapid sequence.
The no-longer adolescent voice of Hannah Gibbs, that
once-immature lilt of it gone, said, “Hello, Tommy. It’s been a long time since
we’ve seen you. It’s been forever,” her words coming as if intended for all
four people in the store. An intangible light leaped about her, an understanding
and acceptance accompanying her voice, her carriage. The other Tommy, the young
man reaching for the fishing pole, instantly recognized a singular point in his
own life as well as in his mother’s life, though he could not say a word. A
burden, a long immoveable burden, had moved.
His mother spoke to this other man the way she would speak
to a dear friend. “What have you been doing all this time, Tommy, this forever?”
She had taken a step forward, closing the distance between her and the visitor.
Tomorrow Sandspur could only manage a few words, so deep had
realizations come upon him. “I am the minister at Gracious Mountain
Church down in the Chawkenauga,
along the Shenandoah. What have you been doing all this time?” He nodded at his
reflection holding the fishing pole.
Luddum and the young man looked on, both sharing the same
awareness, alert to every signal, seeing a story run its pages.
“My son Tommy and I live where I was born, and where he was
born, at my father’s farm, though my father’s been gone for five years now. I
play the organ at our church. When Tommy’s not working parts of the farm, he
fishes. He’s very good at it.” One hand touched the broad shoulder of her son.
Tomorrow Sandspur’s whole life leaped at him, and he somehow
felt that Molly Pritchard Ware had let go her long grasp.
“I know where there’s an organ that hasn’t been played in
fifteen or so years, down there in the Chawkenauga.”
Ben Luddum, as quietly as he could manage, slipped out the
back door, and then rushed to tell his wife what he had just seen. He wondered
if she would believe it.